Mary Gordon Casts A Cold Eye On This Irish Catholic Family

October 15, 1989|By Reviewed by Eugene Kennedy, An author whose whose most recent book is ``Cardinal Bernardin``.

The Other Side

By Mary Gordon

Viking, 386 pages, $19.95

Characteristically, Mary Gordon`s new novel, ``The Other Side,`` quickly engages the reader`s attention. The McNamara`s, Vincent and Ellen, are each 90 years old, the husband in a nursing home out on Long Island, the wife in the grip of a numbing final illness in the now-choked Queens neighborhood where she once raised chickens in the backyard. Cracked and fragile, they remain the seal that holds together the tangled and shredded ribbons of their multi-generation Irish Catholic family.

The story is set on one summer day in 1985-the vigil of the feast of the Assumption, ``for those who note such things,`` as the author observes in a revealing phrase. The family members, most of whom have not moved far away from this house, are gathering to welcome the patriarchal Vincent back from his 10-month recuperation from a hip broken when Ellen pushed him down in a wild, beclouded and angry effort to break free of the prison of her suffering. He had promised her, 60 years before, that he would see to it that she would die in her own bed.

The expectation of Vincent`s return and the reactions to it bind this album of family history together. In short, this is a setting familiar to many Americans, not just the Irish Catholics of Gordon`s concern. Almost everybody has been touched by the reality of families spread in tumbled array in the shadow of forebears who meet the gerontologists` definition of the ``old old,`` those over 85 who constitute the fastest growing segment of the population.

Therefore, one is immediately curious about Gordon`s view of this world-one in which the traditions of such family founders seem to have been so transformed in this century by religious intermarriage, divorce, untimely death, spiritual estrangement and experimentation and by the numberless other ills and opportunities of modern life. Who would not be anxious to see what news a serious artist might bring to us in a novel, perhaps the only format that allows serious exploration of this poorly lighted but common territory of our experience?

Gordon introduces her cast with a practiced hand. ``One,`` she tells us,

``of Vincent and Ellen`s children is dead; John, their only son, killed in the war. His son, Daniel, born after his death, stands outside his

grandmother`s bedroom.`` So we come to know them, hoping that if this is not a Grand Hotel of interesting persons, it will at least avoid being a ship of fools.

But soon-and surprisingly so, given Gordon`s gifts-an unrelentingly pessimistic and hostile mood pervades the book. At first it is as if we were watching a police line-up of increasingly unpleasant suspects; this turns quickly into a shooting gallery of targets at whom the author can direct the steady fire of her discontents.

Dan`s daughters, Darci and Staci, are coming from life with his divorced wife that afternoon; his older sister, Magdalene, once heroic in a battle with cancer, now hardly ever leaves her nearby apartment, and nobody is sure that she will stir that day. Resenting her mother`s lack of attention to her, Magdalene ignores her own daughter, Camille, preferring a blurry and undemanding dream of friendship with her homosexual partner in a beauty salon. The McNamara`s other daughter, Theresa, married to a retired policeman and the mother of a wandering and hostile son and a thrice-divorced daughter, is a medical secretary who speaks to the Holy Ghost. Magdalene`s daughter, Camille, shares a law practice with Dan-pursuing a love affair with a Jewish lawyer, Ira, while her estranged husband, Bob, makes a world by seeking out ham radio partners in the basement of their home.

These confused individuals are not necessarily unappealing. They are, after all, the people we all know, the family of which we are all members. And we would grow in our understanding of them, and of the world we share with them, if they were sketched in a full-bodied way by a novelist who possessed a feeling for their sadnesses and failures.

But, for whatever reason, the talented Gordon cannot approach the situation of her novel or these characters with human sympathy. One is put off by their shallowness, by their set-piece performances, by the author`s dislike of her own creations, by the obsessive and repetitive writing that does in what must have been the noble vision with which Gordon began this work.

The ``other side`` of the title is meant to refer to the immigrant transit of the Irish leading characters. However, the reader who perseveres may begin to feel that the phrase refers to some dimension of the writer`s own personality, perhaps an unrelieved and unredeemed anger at her own sense of being trapped by some smothering and unjust fate.

Gordon seems to be assenting to, almost to be willing, the claustrophobic misery of her own imagination, this ``other side`` of her own life. Indeed, one finishes this book feeling that she identifies with the aged Vincent as he returns to keep his promise to his wife: ``And he knows he is right to be there, that there never was a choice.``